Baltic Germans

Baltic Germans are an ethnic group made up of German people who live in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. The Baltic Germans decreased in population after Adolf Hitler had them resettle in Nazi Germany in the "General Government" (Poland) and they moved to Germany after the war.

History
In the 1200s, many German colonists immigrated to the Baltics, which were being civilized by the Teutonic Order crusaders. The pagan Samogitians and their Lithuanian tribal allies were pushed back as Germans founded settlements for their colonists, and even after the fall of the Teutonic Knights in 1529 they remained in the Baltics region, which was now their homes. The Baltic Germans remained a minor ethnic group in the Baltics, but they intermarried with some foreign Danes, Swedes, English, Scots, Poles, Dutch, and Hungarians in addition to the native Estonians, Livonians, and Latvians. In an intermarriage, the other ethnic group would often be Germanized in language, names, and customs. The Baltic Germans became the upper class during the rule of Sweden, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire from the 1500s to 1900s, but in 1939 the German ultranationalist Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Nazi Germany, began to change things. He invaded Poland in September 1939 in alliance with the Soviet Union, whose dictator Josef Stalin was as cruel and also an idealist. Hitler was able to conquer Poland, and in 1940 he began a series of treaties with Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to guarantee the transfer of Baltic Germans to German settlements. 13,700 Germans left Estonia, and 51,000 Germans left Latvia. Germany went on to take over the Baltics in June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, and in 1944 many Baltic Germans fled from the Baltics to avoid the Red Army's reprisal for the killing of Soviet civilians. Today, there are a few Baltic Germans left, their population never having passed 10% of the total Baltic population.